This year I set up a clothing brand on Shopify, four products at launch and twelve now. From the front the store looked ready: the theme was finished and the photos were good. Underneath, the product data said "T-SHIRT, DTFILM", because that is what the print supplier sent over, and that data is what Google reads when it decides what you sell. No keyword tool fixes it for you.
Before anyone writes an article or buys an ad, I clean that data up. Below is the order I work in during a new store's first week, taken from that brand with the details that identify it removed. You won't need a developer for any of it, and almost all of it happens in the Shopify admin.
Start with the search listing of each product
Every product, collection and page in Shopify has a search engine listing you can edit at the bottom of its settings. By default Shopify fills it with the product name and the first line of the description, and for a hoodie that first line is usually a slogan.
I rewrite each title around fabric and cut, because that is what a person types into Google. "Men's Fleece Hoodie, Regular Fit" tells a search engine more than "Made for Slow Mornings." The description gets the same treatment: what it is, who it is for, what it is made of, and one sentence on delivery. The home page title sits somewhere else, under Online Store, then Preferences, and it's the one people forget.
Swap the supplier's codes for real categories
Print-on-demand suppliers and bulk imports fill the product type field with their own internal codes, which is where "T-SHIRT, DTFILM" came from. Shopify also has a standard product category, a tree of real-world categories that Google Merchant Center and other sales channels read. I set both by hand for every product: type "Hoodies", category "Clothing Tops, Hoodies", and so on. A duffel bag photographed at a gym still goes under "Luggage and Bags", whatever the photo suggests.
Tags serve the store's own navigation and filters. I keep them short and consistent (material, fit, audience), because once a product carries twenty tags the filters stop helping the shopper.
Alt text, one line per photo
You might have twelve photos of the same hoodie, and a machine can only tell them apart by the alt text. Shopify leaves that field empty or copies the product name into every photo. I write one line per image with the product, the colour and the view: "men's hoodie in athletic heather, front view." For clothing, image search brings in real visitors, so the colour and the view matter.
The supplier usually puts the colour in the file name. With a spreadsheet you can do sixty images in an afternoon, and an assistant that reads the file names does it in minutes.
The FAQ, and a markup change you should know about
New stores get the same questions: where do you ship, how long does it take, can I return it, how do I wash it. I put the answers on one FAQ page linked from the footer. The three that decide a purchase (shipping, returns, care) I repeat as a short block under the product description.
For years stores added FAQ structured data to get expandable questions under their Google result. Google has dropped that feature. Its documentation says: "This feature will no longer appear in Google Search starting May 7, 2026." Source: FAQ structured data. Customers, your support inbox, search engines and AI assistants still read the visible FAQ as text. Add the markup if your theme makes it easy, but don't wait for a rich result from it.
Policies, a sharing image and the Instagram link
I publish the shipping and refund policies as real pages and link them from the footer and the product page. Customers look for them before paying, and Google and AI assistants look for them when they judge whether a store can be trusted.
Under Online Store, then Preferences, I also set a social sharing image, 1200 by 630. Without it, anyone who shares a link to the store in a chat or a post gets a blank card. Last, I add the brand's Instagram in the theme settings, so the store's structured data lists it and the store and the profile link to each other.
What I leave for week two
With the data clean, the brand owner writes the product descriptions in the brand's own voice. Reviews come from real customers only. A review app that shows a five-star average nobody wrote invites penalties, and the customer who notices stops trusting everything else on the page. After that come a size guide on its own page, Google Merchant Center and a Google Business Profile, both fed by the product data you fixed in the first three steps. I start the blog last, with three to five articles, once the brand has something to say.
Don't expect traffic from this week, and don't expect AI assistants to recommend a four-product store yet. They recommend brands that people write about elsewhere, in reviews, forums, videos and press. What the first week gives you is a store that Google and the ad platforms can read when you start sending people to it.
My tip: search optimisation for a new store is order in the data, not keywords: product types, image descriptions, FAQ, policies. Google and AI search should be able to understand what the product is without seeing the picture. The polish comes after.
Shopping and Performance Max ads run on the same product data, and I cover that side in Google Merchant Shopify Feed Optimization. If you'd rather go through the first week together with me, that's a consultation.
